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Aaron Rafi is a Canadian poet, now living in Toronto, best known for his Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam (2006). Its 48 prose poems are spoken by the Russian poet Osip, his wife Nadezhda, a voice from Stalin's transit camps, and a researcher.

Born November 15, 1881, Franklin P. Adams worked for forty years as a leading New York newspaper daily columnist and wit penning light verse and a weekly diary that amused a large and literate audience. A few years after graduating from the Armour Scientific Academy in Chicago in 1899, Adams first entered journalism in Chicago.

Sarah Flower was born in Harlow, Essex, and married William Bridges Adams in 1834. Harold William Stephenson wrote a biography of this actress--Lady Macbeth, 1837--dramatic poet (Vivia Perpetua, 1841) and Unitarian hymn writer in The Author of Nearer my God to Thee in 1922.

Cecil Frances Humphreys was born at 25 Eccles Street, Dublin, and lived in Miltown House, county Tyrone, Ireland, beginning in 1833. She married the Right Reverend W. Alexander, Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, in 1850. She wrote nearly 400 hymns, among which her work for children established her reputation as a poet.

William Allingham, born at Ballyshannon, published and edited verse from 1850 to his death in London on November 18, 1889. He worked for the customs service in London until his retirement in 1870, when he became sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine, then editor from 1874 to 1879. He married Helen Paterson, the water colourist. He was buried in St.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was the illegitimate son of a Polish mother whose name was Kostrowitzky. After desultory studies in Paris, he led a rather nomadic life until the First Great War in which he enlisted in 1914. He was wounded in 1916 and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Apollinaire has many moods and many styles.

James Arthur's first book of poetry, Charms Against Lightning, was published as a Lannan Literary Selection by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic and The New Yorker. In 2003 he received an MFA from the University of Washington, and he is currently an Assistant Proffessor at Johns Hopkins University.

Thomas Kyme, Anne's husband, expelled her from their Lincolnshire home, after Anne herself left him to preach in London, denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, which holds that the bread and wine of the Christian mass or communion are literally transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, on July 25, 1825, John Askham had almost no formal education. After labouring as a child in his father's shoe-making shop, Askham earned his living as a shoe-maker. He taught himself to read and write and published his verses in local newspapers and then as volumes, financed by subscriptions.

Born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, Anna Letitia Aitkin was educated at home by her mother, Jane Jennings. Her father became tutor in divinity at a new Presbyterian school at Warrington, Lancashire, where 15-year-old Anna became friends with Joseph Priestley and his wife when he moved there as tutor in languages in 1761.

An often-published antiquarian, novelist, and travel writer, Baring-Gould was born in Exeter and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1864 he became curate of Horbury, Yorkshire, but moved to become rector of Lew Trenchard, Devon, in 1881, when he inherited his family estate there, and stayed until his death.

Born at Indian Hill, Ohio, March 6, 1809, David Bates was educated as a clerk in Buffalo and then in a mercantile house in Indianapolis, Indiana. Eventually he rose in the company to be a full member and its buyer, and he and his family settled in Philadelphia. He contributed as a man of letters to journals and published a volume of poetry, Eolian, in 1849.

Katharine Lee Bates, born August 12, 1859, graduated from Wellesley College in 1880, joined its English Department five years later, and earned a Masters degree there in 1891 following study at Oxford in 1888-89. She published the scholarly work for which she is best known critically, The English Religious Drama, in 1893, and edited many classics of English literature.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) spent most of his life in Paris, though one can see in some of his poetry the influence of an early voyage he made to the East Indies. His mother and stepfather had encouraged this trip in the hope that it would make Baudelaire forget about following a literary career.

After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Joseph Warren Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate alma mater. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired.

Born in 673 and sent at seven years old by his parents to the monastery of St. Peter in Monkwearmouth, Bede moved to the abbey at Jarrow in 682, where he lived as a monk until his death on May 25, 735.

Rémy Belleau (1528-1577) was also a member of the "Pléiade" and an enthusiastic student of the classics. He imitated Anacreon in his Petites Inventions (1556), but is best known for his Bergerie (1565), a pastoral narrative interspersed with poems. Belleau excels in descriptive poetry and especially in the portrayal of nature of which "Avril" is the best-known example.

Born April 24, 1862, to Mary Sidgwick and Edward White Benson, future archbishop of Canterbury (1882-1896), Arthur Christopher Benson became a popular essayist of Edwardian England, the librettist of England's beloved anthem, "Land of Hope and Glory," and the editor of Queen Victoria's letters.

John Betjeman, son of Ernest Edward Betjemann (a furniture manufacturer) and Mabel Bessie Dawson, was born at Parliament Hill Mansions, north London. John adopted his style of spelling the family name around the age of twenty-one (the name can be traced back to Dutch or German origin). After attending Byron House Montessori School, where he was briefly taught by T. S.

Cartoonist, political satirist, poet, and writer of fiction, Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. He enlisted very young in the 9th Indiana Infantry in the American civil war and had risen to the rank of lieutenant by its close.

James A. Bland, perhaps the greatest African-American folksong writer, was born in 1854 in Flushing, New York. His father, who received a law degree from Howard University, was the first African American appointed examiner to the United States Patent Office.

Edward Dickinson Blodgett, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada, has authored seventeen books of poetry. His Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano (1996) won the Governor- General's Award for English language poetry.

Louise Bogan was born in Livermore, Maine, August 11, 1897, and was educated at the Girls' Latin High School and Boston University, which she left without taking a degree. Her first marriage, to Curt Alexander, an army officer, in 1916, was effectively over by 1918. Their daughter Maidie was born Oct. 19, 1917, but was raised by Bogan's parents. Alexander died in 1920.

Lucille Bogan, (nee Armstrong) was born in Amory, Mississippi, on April 1, 1897 and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She married Nazareth Bogan, with whom she had two children. Bogan, who also used the pseudonym Bessie Jackson, was a blues writer and performer, known for her explicit lyrics, which covered topics such as sex, prostitution and alcoholism.

A late Victorian English poet from Buddington, Sussex, Francis William Bourdillon was born on March 22, 1852, educated at Worcester College, Oxford, and acted as tutor to the Prince and the Princess Christian at Cumberland Lodge. He published 13 volumes of poems from 1878 to 1921.

Little is known of this soldier-poet of the First World War. At least three of his poems were originally published in The Stars and Stripes, an eight-page weekly brought out in France by the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) of the United States Army from February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919.

One of the greatest poets of the 17th century, Anne Bradstreet was born in Northamptonshire, England, ca. 1612-13, daughter to Thomas Dudley, a clerk, and Dorothy Yorke. By 1619 Dudley became steward to the earl of Lincolnshire at Sempringham, and three years later acquired Anne's future husband, Simon Bradstreet, as an assistant, freshly graduated from Cambridge University.

Christopher John Brennan was born in Sydney, Australia in 1870 of Irish parents. Brennan first studied for the priesthood, but abandoned his vocation at St. Ignatius College for the University of Sydney. There Brennan concentrated on classics and philosophy, graduating from the University with first class honours in 1891.

Robert Bridges was born October 23, 1844, in Walmer, Kent. Educated at Eton College from 1854 to 1863, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1863 to 1867, where he took a B.A., and finally at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he completed his M.B. in 1874. He served as a physician successively in London at St.

Rupert Brooke was born August 3, 1887, at Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated there and at King's College, Cambridge, which he left with a degree in 1909. His first book of verse, Poems, came out in 1911. After studying briefly in Munich in 1912, he returned to live in England at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire.

Charles William Shirley Brooks was born on 29 April, 1816 at 52 Doughty Street, London. The son of Elizabeth and William Brooks (an architect), he was articled to his uncle Charles Sabine of Oswestry after receiving his early education. In 1938, he passed the Incorporated Law Society's examination, but there is no record of Brooks becoming a solicitor.

Poet, novelist and newspaperman Charles Bruce was born in 1906 in Port Shoreham, Nova Scotia. After graduating from Mount Allison University in 1927 with a Bachelor of Arts, he joined the Canadian Press in Halifax and was transferred to Toronto in 1933. Among his six collections of poetry is The Mulgrave Road, which won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry in 1951.

Although not a South African, but rather educated at Haslemere, Alice Mary Buckton's The Burden of Engela (1904) well described the life of a Boer woman on a Transvaal farm during the Anglo-Boer War. (Thanks to André le Roux, Reference section, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, for assistance.)

Professor Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, chair of the Department of Botany, University of Manitoba (1904-36), was born in Birmingham on August 19, 1874. He obtained his Ph.D. at Leipzig before joining the university. His best-known academic work was Researches in Fungi, 7 vols.

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, near Bedford, and baptized Nov. 30, 1628, the son of a tinker, and like his father a tinker. He joined joined the parliamentary forces in the English civil war in 1644. On leaving, he married in 1646 a pious woman whose only dowry was two books, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly's The Practice of Piety. They had four children.

Born in Boston on January 30, 1866, Frank Gelett Burgess graduated from M.I.T. in 1887 with a B.Sc. and went to work as a draftsman, eventually becoming an instructor at the University of California at Berkeley. His gift was comic verse and fiction.

Clara G. Dolliver, a San Franciscan, published poems and short stories in journals such as St. Nicholas Magazine and Oliver Optic's Magazine. She was especially well-known for the poem "No Baby in the House" (see Nancy J. Peters and Lawrence Ferlingetti, Literary San Francisco [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980]: 46-48).

Cædmon's story has one source -- Book IV, Chapter 24, of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (finished in 731) by the Venerable Bede (673-735), a monk of Jarrow in Northumbria. The following excerpt is rendered into modern English from A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Shirley-Price (Penguin Books, 1955): 245-47:

Charles Stuart Calverley, born on December 22, 1831, at Martley, Worcestershire, was educated at Marlborough College, Harrow, Oxford, and Cambridge, and was elected a fellow of Christ's College and appointed a lecturer in Classics in 1857. His Verses and Translations (1862), and later translations of Theocritus and Virgil, stem from his academic research.

Born in Kitchener (then Berlin), Ontario, Campbell grew up in Wiarton, attended high school in Owen Sound, and studied at University College in 1881-82 (where he wrote for the student newspaper The Varsity) and Wycliffe College in 1882-83, Toronto, and then at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Except for the elegy on Donne, which first appeared in Donne's Poems, 1633, the poems by Carew in this selection were first published shortly after his death, in Poems, 1640. A considerable number of them were set to music, and numerous manuscript versions of this song exist with considerable differences of text.

An illegitimate child, possibly of George Savile, marquess of Halifax (1633-95), Henry Carey earned a living as a writer of burlesques, poems, and occasionally music. A protégé of Addison, who liked his "Sally in our Alley," Carey succeeded best when he was most amusing.

Thomas Carlyle was born on December 4, 1795. After attending Annan Academy and Edinburgh University, he taught mathematics for a time before finding his vocation as one of the foremost essayists, biographers, and historians of his century.

Born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritimes, and educated at the University of New Brunswick, Carman authored more than 50 volumes of poetry in his lifetime and became recognized, after his coast-to-coast tour in 1921 reading his poetry, as Canada's unofficial poet laureate. His career as a man of letters was never in doubt for this first cousin of the poet Charles G. D.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll (his pseudonym), was born in 1832 and educated at Rugby College and Christ Church, Oxford. Although a lecturer in mathematics there from 1855, Dodgson achieved international fame as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1866) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found there (1871).

William Herbert Carruth, born on April 5, 1859, near Osawatomie, Kansas, received his B.A. in modern languages at the University of Kansas (1880), studied at the Universities of Berlin and Munich, and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1889, 1893). He served as Professor of Modern Languages and then German at the University of Kansas throughout his life.

André-Marie Chenier (1762-1794) was a victim of the French Revolution. Born in Constantinople of a Greek mother and a French father in the diplomatic service, he early felt the influence of classical antiquity though he was educated in France. Chénier was widely travelled and active in politics. Arrested in France on a false suspicion of animosity to the new regime, he was imprisoned at St.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on 29 May, 1874 at 32 Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, London. He was the elder son of Edward Chesterton (an estate agent) and Marie Louise (née Grosjean). As Chesterton would later emphasize in his Autobiography (1936), he had a comfortable upbringing in a middle-class family and a generally happy childhood.

Born February 11, 1802, in Medford, Massachusetts, Lydia Maria Child made her living as a novelist, story-story writer, schoolteacher, editor, writer for children, and controversialist. Her first notorious work, a novel entitled Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824), celebrated interracial marriage.

Margaret Christakos teaches creative writing at the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto. She also works as a poetry advisor/mentor with WIER (Writers in Electronic Residence), with the MFA program at the University of Guelph-Humber, and with Diaspora Dialogues.

George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. His works include the poem-novel, Whylah Falls (1990), the narrative lyric sequence, Execution Poems (2001), and the verse-play and opera, Beatrice Chancy (1999).

Paul Claudel (1868-1955) was a professional diplomat who represented France as ambassador in many countries including China and the United States. In his poetry, he reveals himself as a fervent Catholic and mystic. Claudel often writes in short versets which make his thought difficult to follow.

Wayne Clifford is a Canadian poet, editor, and educator. He has written more than a dozen books of poetry, including the goundbreaking sonnet sequence The Exile's Papers, which currently extends over three volumes. After attaining his M.A. and M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 1969, he spent three and half decades working at a small college in Kingston, Ontario.

Born September 19, 1796, at Kingsdown, Bristol, Hartley Coleridge was the oldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was the subject of one of his father's finest poems, "Frost at Midnight," and of Wordsworth's astute "To H. C. -- Six Years Old." After his parents separated, Hartley was brought up by Robert Southey at Keswick.

Edmund Vance Cooke, popularly known as "the poet laureate of childhood," was born on June 5, 1866, in Port Dover, Ontario, Canada. He began working at 13-14 years old for the White Sewing Machine Co. factory and stayed there for 14 years until he became a self-employed poet and lecturer in 1893. His first book of poems, A Patch of Pansies, came out the next year.

Little is known of Dr. D. Cooper other than that six songs of his survive in manuscripts and a fragment of an early printed book of the period. For this text, see R. L. Greene, The Early English Carols (1935), no. 465; and John Stevens, Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961): 408-09 (and Appendix B, nos.

Adela Florence Cory was born on April 9, 1865, at Stoke Bishop, Gloucestershire, to Colonel Arthur Cory and Fanny Elizabeth Griffin. She was brought up by relations in England and attended school in Richmond near London while her father, in the Bombay army, was posted in Lahore, India.

Educator (his tenure as Assistant Master of Eton College lasted from 1845 to 1872) and author of A Guide to Modern British History (New York: Holt, 1880-82), William Johnson became William Johnson Cory after his retirement. A brief biography appears in the third edition of Ionica, his translation of classical poems, as edited by Arthur C. Benson (London: G.

Dani Couture is a Toronto-based writer and editor. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Good Meat (Pedlar Press, 2006), and Sweet (Pedlar Press, 2010), which won the Relit Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her first novel, Algoma, was published by Invisible Publishing in 2011.

In a preface dated April 20, 1901, Craig introduces his one book of verse by explaining that it "possesses neither literary nor poetic merit" and that it "is published at the request of sundry friends of the author employed on the Beira and Mashonaland Railways" (7).

Born the daughter of a nonconformist minister in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, Dinah Mulock took her mother and siblings to London and supported them by writing novels, the most successful of which, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), enabled her eventually to build Corner House in Shortlands, Kent, where she spent the rest of her life.

Adelaide Crapsey taught at Kemper Hall (1902-04), Miss Lowe's Preparatory School, Stamford, Conn. (1906-08), and Smith College (1911-12). She invented the quintain and died much too young for one with such astonishing skill as a poet.

Isabella Valancy Crawford was born in Dublin in 1850 (according to conjecture, on Dec. 25), the sixth child of Dr. Stephen Dennis Crawford and Sidney Scott Crawford. The family emigrated to Canada and settled in Paisley, Ontario, in 1857, where her father became the settlement's family doctor.

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was born in Leeds on July 21, 1865. He was among the most acerbic men of letters and journalists of his lifetime. An anti-Scottish Tory and Monarchist, a Methodist, Crosland earned his living as a Fleet Street reviewer, critic, and editor for journals like The Outlook, The Academy, and the Penny Illustrated Paper.

Charles was born on 24 November 1394, the first surviving son of Louis d'Orléans and Valentina Visconti of Milan. The Duchess Valentina was banished from court in 1396 and as a result, Charles and his siblings were brought up in their father's multiple châteaux along the Loire.

Daniel's Complete Works were edited by A. B. Grosart and published in five volumes, 1885-96. The Defense of Ryme and a selection of the poems were edited by A. C. Sprague (Harvard University Press, 1930).

E. R. "Bus" Davey grew up in London, Ontario. In 1943 he was posted to the Royal Air Force Banff Strike Wing (Scotland) as a member of the 404 squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force. On October 2, 1944, piloting Beaufighter "Q" (#LV 189), Davey died as a result of a mid-air collision with Beaufighter F.

Poet, translator, novelist, and man of letters, John Davidson spent the first part of his life as a teacher in Greenock, Glasgow, Perth, Crieff, and other places. In 1884 he married Margaret Macarthur, who bore him two sons. In 1899 he moved to London and earned a living by journalism.

José-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905) was born in Cuba of a Spanish father and a French mother. Educated in France, he became the disciple and close friend of Leconte de Lisle. Like the latter, he cultivates erudition, impersonality, and perfection of form. Heredia excelled in sonnets, and these were made into a collection by him in 1893 under the tide Les Trophées.

Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) is the most widely read and the best loved of French classical writers. In France every school child studies his fables and leams some of them by heart. La Fontaine is a conscientious artist who also wrote longer poems and Contes et nouvelles en vers, and it is a mistake to think of him as writing primarily for children.

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) was born of a noble family at Mâcon, where he spent a happy childhood with his mother and sisters. In October 1816 Lamartine visited Aix-les-Bains where he met Madame Julie Charles, who, as Elvire, was to inspire many of the poems in the famous Méditations poétiques.

Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894) was born on Reunion Island off East Africa. He studied law in France but spent his life as a journalist and translator. Like Vigny, he is a pessimist, but he refuses to express his personal despair. He turns for inspiration to the classics and the Orient.

Henri de Régnier (1864-1936) is the author of many novels and short stories as well as collections of poetry and essays on literary criticism. He began as a disciple of Leconte de Lisle and Heredia and later became one of the chiefs of the Symbolist movement. His poetry is notable for its delicate effects and the perfection of its form.

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), who was the leader of the "Pléiade," is a poet of superlative technique and tremendous variety. After a brief career as a page in the royal household, cut short by an illness which left him deaf, Ronsard along with Du Bellay became a member of a group which studied Greek and Latin under the famous humanist, Dorat.

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, described by P. Lal as a "Calcutta Eurasian of Portuguese Indian ancestry," was born on April 18, 1809, and educated in a private English-speaking school in the Dharmatala or (today) Esplanade area around the Shahid Minar in Calcutta.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, born in Arezzo, Italy, in 1949, grew up in Montreal, Toronto, and Baltimore, and then moved to Toronto in 1967, where he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto until the early 1970s. In his first career, as poet and literary editor, he paused after his eleventh collection of poems, Virgin Science (1986).

Robert Dodsley wrote both Servitude (1729) and The Muse in Livery (1732) while working for the Hon. Mrs. Lowther. Later he devised several plays, The Toyshop (1735), The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741), and Cleone (1758).

All the poems by Donne included here, except "The First Anniversary" (1611) and "The Second Anniversary" (1612), were first published, after Donne's death, in the 1633 or 1635 editions of Poems, by J. D. Most of the non-religious poems may have been written by the time he was twenty-five.

Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953, and went through high school in Tucson, Arizona, where he entered the University of Arizona. In 1971 he married Ruth Dawson, a poet, and took a B.A. at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, at which he also taught for one year. During these years, he made his life's work poetry.

An immigrant to Montreal from Ireland, Drummond graduated with an M.D. from McGill University in 1884 and started practising in the eastern townships (along the St. Lawrence River) to which his dialect poems so often refer. In 1888 he moved to Montreal.

The texts used are based on Douglas Grant's Reynard Library edition (Hart-Davis, 1952). The specific edition used by Professor Grant is given for each work here. The spelling has been modernized, but not the punctuation. Note that the punctuation is generally rhetorical rather than syntactical.

Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560) was a member of the group of poets known as the "Pléiade." He was the author of the celebrated Defense et Illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), which sought to break with mediaeval traditions mainly by following the example of the best Greek and Latin poetry.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised by his mother, Paul Dunbar stood out as the only black student in Central High School, the class poet, the editor of the school newspaper, and the president of its literary club, the Philomathean Society.

Romesh Chunder Dutt was born in Calcutta on August 13, 1848, and received his education there and at University College and the Middle Temple, London. He was called to the bar and in 1869 passed the examination for entrance to the Indian civil service, in which he served -- as the only native Indian in the nineteenth century to rise to executive authority -- from 1871 to 1897.

Toru Dutt was born on March 4, 1856, in Rambagan, 12 Manicktollah Street, Calcutta, to father Govin Chunder Dutt and mother Kshetramoni, a family that become Christians in 1862. Toru was the youngest child, arriving after sister Aru and brother Abju (who died in 1865). Their cousin was the poet and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt.

Mary Ann Evans was born on Nov. 22, 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, to Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson. She was educated at Nuneaton and Coventry (1841-). Her first publication was a poem in the Christian Observer (Jan. 1840). After leaving the Church, she moved to London in 1849 and edited The Westminster from 1851 to 1853.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his education at Smith Academy there, at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and at Harvard University, where he obtained a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy (1909-10) and taught briefly in 1913-14. His Ph.D. thesis on F. H.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston and attended Boston Latin School from 1812 to 1817, and Harvard from then to 1821. His first career, as a school-teacher, lasted four years, after which he was licensed to preach as a Unitarian. In 1829 he was ordained minister of Second Church in Boston and married his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker.

Daniel Decatur Emmett was born in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on October 29, 1815. After working in newspaper offices, and serving in the army, Emmett played in circus bands. Emmett organized the first black minstrel company, the Virginia Minstrels, in New York in 1843; he played the violin, and his band was a great success.

George Essex Evans, born on June 18, 1863, in London, emigrated to Australia in 1881 and became District Registrar, Toowoomba. He published three volumes of verse, The Repentance of Magdalene Despar (1891), Loraine and Other Verses (1898), and The Secret Key and Other Verses (1906). He and Mrs. Blanche Hopkins married and had one son, Bowen.

Born in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1885, Kingsley Fairbridge was educated at St. Andrew's College, but at eleven, his family moved to Umtali in the eastern highlands of Rhodesia. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he graduated with a first from Exeter College in October 1908. In the following year he published Veld Verse and Other Lines.

Eugene Field was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1850, educated in Monson and Williamstown, Mass., at Knox College (Galesburg, Illinois), and at the University of Missouri. His career in journalism saw him write for newspapers in St.

Born November 5, 1884, in London, James Elroy Flecker received his education at Uppingham and Trinity College, Oxford. He joined the Consular Service in 1908, was posted to Constantinople in 1910, and he married Helle Skiadaressi, a Greek. From 1911 to 1913 Flecker served as vice-consul at Beirut. Suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Switzerland where he died January 3, 1915.

Stephen Foster was born July 4, 1826, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Allegheny Academy, Athens Academy, and Jefferson College. He became a full-time musician in 1850, working for and with Christy's Minstrels, Campbell Minstrels, and the New Orleans Serenaders. His songs made him famous with the public.

Born and dying in Winslow, Buckinghamshire, Sarah Fyge was twice married, first unwillingly to a lawyer, Edward Field, who died leaving her a well-off widow without children, and second very unhappily, and publicly so, to the much older Reverend Thomas Egerton, rector of Adstock, who died in 1720.

Rose Amy Fyleman was born on the outskirts of Nottingam on 6 March, 1877 to Emilie (née Loewenstein) and John Feilman. Her mother had immigrated from Russia, while her father's family was situated in Germany seventeen years prior to Rose's birth.

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) started out as a painter, but he soon turned to literature. He gained a livelihood as a journalist and critic, writing poetry and novels in his spare time. Gautier excels in descriptions, and one can see in them the influence of his early interest and training in the plastic arts.

Born in 1809, Kasiprasad Ghose graduated from Hindu College, Calcutta, in 1828, and went on to edit a weekly newspaper, The Hindu Intelligence. His only volume of poems, The Shair and Other Poems, came out in 1839. He died in 1873.

Ruth Gilbert was born at Greytown, New Zealand, in 1917, daughter of Florence Margaret (Carrington), a music teacher, and Henry George Gilbert, a Prebyterian minister and violin-maker. In 1945 she married John B. Mackay (1918-95), a doctor, and has four children.

Marc-Antoine Girard, Sieur de Saint-Amant (1594-1661) was an adventurer and bon vivant. As an officer and diplomat, he served in Spain, Italy, England, and Poland. His poetry is extremely varied in style, ranging all the way from the tenderly lyrical to fierce burlesque.

Phyllis Gotlieb, born in Toronto on May 25, 1926, to parents who owned a movie theatre, received her B.A. (1948) and M.A. (1950) from the University of Toronto. She published five volumes of poetry from 1964 to 2002, one of them nominated for a Governor General's Award.

Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield (John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps), the representative of the British monarch in Canada, established the annual Governor General's Literary Awards in 1936 for the best books of the year. These are the most prestigious such awards in Canada.

Julian H. F. Grenfell was born March 30, 1888, and died in battle on May 26, 1915, a captain in the Royal Dragoons. For a biography, see Nicholas Mosley, Julian Grenfell, his life and the times of his death, 1888-1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976).

The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry is the world’s largest prize for a first-edition single collection of poetry written in or translated into English by a living poet and published in the previous year. Chairman Scott Griffin founded the Griffin Trust in April 2000.

Francis Grose (ca. 1731-1791), born in Middlesex, served for more than twenty years in the army, particularly the Hampshire and then the Surrey militia, until he emerged as one of the period's greatest antiquarians.

Born in Birmingham, England, on August 20, 1881, Edgar A. Guest settled with his family in Detroit in 1891. Starting in 1895 as a copy boy at the Detroit Free Press, Guest worked his way up as police reporter, exchange editor, and verse columnist.

Jason Guriel is an internationally acclaimed Canadian poet and critic. He was the first Canadian to be awarded Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize in 2007, and followed it with Poetry's Editors Prize for Book Reviewing in 2009.

Born September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hilda Doolittle wrote poetry, plays, fiction, and speculative prose, and experimented in film. She was educated at the Moravian Girls' Seminary and the Friends' Central School, where she was a keen classicist and basketball player in her youth, being tall (5 feet, 11 inches).

Sarah Josepha Buell was born October 24, 1788, in Newport, New Hampshire. Self-educated, at 18 she became a schoolteacher in Newport and worked there until 1813, when she married David Hale, a lawyer. At his death nine years later, she was a 34-year-old pregnant mother of four who nonetheless rose to become one of America's most successful women writers.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is a professional writer of poetry, short fiction, novels and non-fiction, and a master gardener. She has worked as a photographer focusing on art and newborns. As a lesbian activist who came out in 1982, she helped bring same-sex marriage to Canada (Barbeau v. British Columbia, 2003 BCCA 406). Her hobbies are dance, painting, and sketching.

William Hamilton was born in Dumfries, Scotland, immigrated to South Africa, and was educated at the South African College (now University of Cape Town), where he went on to teach English and Philosophy. He died in Flanders, 1917. (Thanks to André le Roux, Reference section, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, for assistance.)

Thomas Hardy, born in 1840 near Dorchester, took up architectural work, both with a local firm and in London, before turning to writing and publishing novels, beginning with Desperate Remedies in 1871 and ending in Jude the Obscure in 1895.

Charles Harpur, a major nineteenth-century Australian poet, made a living as a sheep farmer and civil servant in New South Wales. Elizabeth Perkins first published a good edition of his poems in 1984. His manuscripts can be seen at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

We are grateful for access to AustLit in the preparation of these poems.

Robert Stephen Hawker was born on Dec. 3, 1803, to Jacob Stephen Hawker and Jane Elizabeth Drewitt. He was educated at Liskeard and Cheltenham Grammar Schools, and Pembroke College and Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in 1828. Hawker brought out his first book of poems, Tendrils, in 1821, and won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for a poem on Pompeii in 1827.

Nothing is known about the life of Anne Hecht, except that she appears well educated and not to have married, perhaps for reasons she may allude to in her verse advice, particularly in its breath-taking last line, which speaks to women's daily life in 18th-century North America.

Brown, Ashley. "Anthony Hecht". Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 169: American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Joseph Conte, State University of New York at Buffalo. Gale Research, 1996. pp. 137-145.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, July 21, 1899, the son of a doctor. He became a reporter in Kansas City after leaving school and volunteered on ambulance duty in Italy in World War I, where he was wounded and won the Croce de Guerra. He became a reporter in Toronto for The Star after the war and in 1921 moved to Paris among literary Americans such as Ezra Pound.

The son of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, Henry was born Dec. 6, 1421, and came to the throne of England and then of France on his father's death, Sept. 1, 1422. John, duke of Bedford, was appointed protector on Dec. 5. Henry was crowned Nov.

Herbert's poems were first published shortly after his death, in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations by Mr. George Herbert, 1633. Some of them had already circulated in MS. His poems are so full of biblical echoes or quotations, and his images so often liturgical, that only full annotation (rather than mere reference) can properly bring out his indebtedness.

The astronomer John Frederick William Herschel was born on March 7, 1792, in Slough, Buckinghamshire. He attended Dr. Gretton's School in Hitcham, Eton College (briefly), and St. John's College Cambridge first as a student (1809-13), and then as elected fellow, graduating with M.A. in 1816. Many honours came to him quickly.

Arthur Clement Hilton was born in 1851 and educated at Marlborough College and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he published in 1872 The Light Green, a collection of verse parodies. After graduating from Wells Theological College in January 1873, Hilton was ordained deacon on March 1, 1874, became curate of St. Clement and St. Mary, Sandwich, and was ordained priest in 1875.

Katharine Tynan, born on January 23, 1861, in Dublin, was educated at the Sienna Convent in Drogheda. She authored over one hundred novels, a five-volume autobiography, and several books of poems. Her friends included George Russell, W. B. Yeats, Christina Rossetti, and Alice Meynell. She married Henry Albert Hinkson, lawyer and novelist, in 1883 and they had three children.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes proceeded to Phillips Academy and Harvard, from which he graduated in 1829. His first, most popular poem, written at 21, was "Old Ironsides." Like most of Holmes' poems, this was an occasional piece, prompted by some incident.

George Moses Horton was born in slavery about 1797 on William Horton's tobacco plantation in Northampton Country, North Carolina. Growing up as a cow-hand in Chatham county, where his master moved, George educated himself to read scripture and to make poems. At 17 years old, he became the property of William's son James and was set to work at a horse-drawn plough.

Editor and owner of the Novascotian, then leader of the Reformers' party, Joseph Howe in 1848 obtained for Nova Scotia status as the first British colony to achieve responsible government. He became Liberal party premier of the province's government from 1860 to 1863, a federal cabinet minister under Sir John A.

Mary Botham, born at Coleford, Gloucestershire, was daughter of Samuel Botham, a Quaker, and in 1821 married William Howitt. They turned to joint-authoring for a living and made a success of their many interests.

Born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up and was educated in Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio. He briefly enrolled in Columbia University in New York in 1921, the year that he published "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in Crisis, a journal which was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1923-24 Hughes worked as a seaman on trips to Africa and Europe.

Essayist, translator of Henri Bergson, aesthetic philosopher, lecturer, and imagist poet whose entire published output was six poems at the time of his death, and whose essays were edited by Sir Herbert Edward Read posthumously in Speculations (1924) and Notes on Language and Style (1929).

Henrietta (Hettie) Anne Heathorn, the daughter of a brewer, met the scientist Thomas Huxley in Sydney, Australia, in 1847, during his term aboard the HMS Rattlesnake. Huxley returned to England in 1850, unhappily leaving his fiancée behind in Sydney. Their loving correspondence survives for the eight years of their separation.

Thomas Henry Huxley, the great Victorian scientist, "Darwin's bulldog," was born in Ealing on May 4, 1825. Despite having only two years of formal schooling, he obtained his M.B. at London University in 1845. This led to a posting as a naval surgeon with H.M.S. Rattlesnake on a surveying voyage to Australia from 1846 to 1850.

Helen Fiske, born in Amherst, Mass., took her two last names from her husbands. She married Edward Bissell Hunt first, was widowed young, in 1865, and shortly afterwards had lost both sons from that marriage as well. Ten years later, she married a quaker, William Sharpless Jackson and lived in Colorado Springs with him.

The standard edition of Jonson's Works is the monumental one by Herford and Simpson (11 vols.; London: Oxford University Press, 1925-53). Most of Jonson's poems appeared first in the Folio of 1616, the later poems in the Second Folio of 1640.

The Times obituary is as follows: "Lieutenant-Colonel Stanley de Vere Julius, who died last week at Millbank Military Hospital, at the age of 54, was educated at St. Laurence College, joined The Royal Sussex Regiment from Sandhurst i n 1896, and served throughout the Tirah campaign.

Francis Scott Key was born in Frederick, Maryland, on August 1, 1779, and after an education at St. John's College, Annapolis, he worked as an attorney, first in his home town, and then in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. In 1814 the British seized Dr. William Beanes in retreat from Washington, and Key was dispatched to arrange his release.

Aline Murray Kilmer was born August 1, 1888, in Norfolk, Virginia, educated at Rutgers Prep School and the Vail-Deane School in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She and the poet Joyce Kilmer married in 1908. Candles That Burn (New York: George H. Doran, 1919), was her first volume of verse. Vigils followed in 1921, and The Poor King's Daughter and Other Poems in 1925.

Poet and literary journalist, Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, attended Rutgers and obtained his A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1908, and married Aline Murray the same year. They had four children, and during this time Kilmer became a Roman Catholic.

According to Glenn Blalock, Ben King was born on March 17, 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, married Aseneth Belle Latham, of St. Joseph, on November 27, 1883, in Chicago, and had two sons by her. King belonged to the Chicago Press Club and to the Whitechapel Club, which attracted authors and journalists.

Edith L. M. King was born at Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, became a student in England, and afterwards taught at Eunice High School, Bloemfontein, where she was headmistress at her retirement in 1922. King spent five years studying art in Paris and exhibited her art with the Everard Group (her older sister was Ruth Everard) and elsewhere.

Novelist, short-story writer, and poet, John Raymond Knister was born in 1899 at Ruscomb, near Stoney Point, Lake St. Clair, where he drowned while swimming in August 1932. He left his widow Myrtle Gamble and a daughter Imogen Givens.

Isa Craig, born Oct. 17, 1831, in Edinburgh, was largely self-educated in literature. By 1853, she worked at and contributed poems to the newspaper the Scotchman. Her first book, Poems by Isa, came out in 1856. She left Scotland for London in 1857, where she was employed as secretary for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science.

William Knox was born August 17, 1789, in Lillieslief, Roxburghshire, and educated there and at Loretto Academy in Musselburgh. He took up farming from his parents but abandoned it for journalism, and especially poetry.

François Tristan l'Hermite (1601-1655) led an adventurous and nomadic life, part of which he describes in Le Page disgracié. He travelled in England, Norway, and Flanders, as well as France. In addition to eight plays, Tristan wrote a great deal of lyric poetry, some heroic verses, and a collection of religious devotions, L'Office de la Sainte Vierge.

Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) was born in Montevideo of Breton parents but his early years were spent at Tarbes in the Hautes Pyrénées. He came to Paris as an adolescent and later spent five years in Germany (1881-1886), where he met and married a young English woman. He died of tuberculosis after seven months of marriage. Laforgue is a poet of anguish concerned with the ultimate meaning of life.

Born February 10, 1775, in London and educated at Christ's Hospital, Charles Lamb was a minor poet (and friend of S. T. Coleridge), but also the earliest editor of Elizabethan drama, and the greatest essay-writer of his age. He first took a job at South Sea House and from 1792 to his retirement in 1825 at East India House.

Frederick Locker Lampson was born in London in May, 1821. After a brief education, he obtained clerkships in Somerset House and then the Admiralty in Whitehall. Financial security came when he married Lady Charlotte Bruce in Paris in July 1849, a union that continued until her death in 1872 and issued in a daughter, Eleanor.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ian Lancashire went to school at Churchill High School and received his B.A. Honours degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Manitoba in 1964. He received his M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) at the University of Toronto and became a lecturer in 1968 at Erindale College.

Born and educated in London, L. E. L. (as she signed her prolific output of poems, stories, and novels) was one of the most popular women writers of the nineteenth century and earned an excellent livelihood from her writings, which she needed to support her parents and siblings.

Born March 31, 1844, in Selkirk, Scotland, Andrew Lang was educated at Selkirk Grammar School, Edinburgh Academy, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Glasgow, and Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a B.A. (honours) in 1866. He took up a fellowship at Merton College in Oxford from 1868 to 1875, in which year he married Lenora Blanche Alleyne.

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to a coal-mining father he could sometimes despise and a mother whom he revered. Later Lawrence wrote about his life with them in Sons and Lovers.

Born at Grenfell, New South Wales, June 17, 1867, Henry Lawson was Australia's first great short-story writer and poet. Educated at New Pipeclay and at the Catholic school at Mudgee, and influenced by his mother's writing, Lawson discovered literature. His deafness became evident when he was nine years old and was total five years later.

Born July 22, 1849, in New York city to Moses and Esther Nathan Lazarus, assimilated, Sephardic Jews, Emma Lazarus grew up in New York city and Newport, Rhode Island. In 1866 she published her first book, Poems and Translations, after which Emerson acted as her informal mentor.

Stephen (Butler) Leacock was born in Swanmoor, Hampshire, on December 30, 1869, and came to Canada in 1876. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Strathroy Collegiate Institute, and the University of Toronto (B.A. 1891). He taught modern languages at Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1889 to 1899.

Brought up in Brackley, Northamptonshire, the daughter of a gardener, and educated only within her family, Mary Leapor worked as her father's housekeeper after her mother's death in 1742. She wrote poetry that came to the attention of Bridget Freemantle, a member of the local gentry.

Born on May 12, 1812, in London, Edward Lear as a teenager found artistic work drawing zoological specimens for illustrated books. One of his patrons was the earl of Derby, for whose children he devised the Book of Nonsense, published in 1846, the year after he had given drawing lessons to Queen Victoria.

Born on August 19, 1891, in Slane, Ireland, Francis Ledwidge left school when twelve years old to work on a farm, on the roads, and in the mines. Before he entered World War I in October 1914 in the 5th battalion of the Royal Inniskillings, Ledwidge published verse in the Drogheda Independent.

Rosanna Eleanor Mullins was born in Montreal and educated at the Convent of the Congregation of Notre Dame. She contributed poems, serialized novels, and short stories to the Literary Garland (1847-51) and other journals. She married in 1851 Dr. Jean-Lukin Leprohon and, of their 13 children, eight survived. The two poems in this selection reveal what this marriage meant to her.

Dewey, Anne Day. "Denise Levertov". Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 165: American Poets Since World War II, Fourth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Joseph Conte, State University of New York at Buffalo. Gale Research, 1996. pp. 147-164.

Born in London, graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, and living her adult life mainly at the family home, 7 Endsleigh Gardens, London, Amy Levy was a feminist Jewish poet and novelist of distinction.

Li Bai (Chinese: 李白; pinyin: Lǐ Bái and/or Lǐ Bó, 701 – 762, also well known as Li Po) was one of the greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, often called China's "golden age" of poetry. A highly serious, productive, and much estimated poet, Li Bai experimented with the traditional rules of versification. About one thousand extant poems are attributed to him.

Abraham Lincoln was born 12 February 1809 near Hodgenville, Kentucky, and grew up with little formal schooling. Self-educated, he was eventually elected to the Illinois House of Representatives and served from 1834 to 1842. Admitted to the bar in 1836, Lincoln used law as a gateway into politics, which dominated his life.

Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, on November 10, 1879. After graduating from Hiram College, Ohio, in 1900, he began a short-lived career in art and lectured at the Y.M.C.A. in New York.

Michael Lista is a Canadian poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of Bloom (House of Anansi Press), which was named one of Quill and Quire's ten best books of 2010. His work has appeared internationally in venues such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Border Crossings, and Poetry.

Henry Livingston Jr. was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on Oct. 13, 1748. The Livingston family was one of the important colonial and revolutionary families of New York. The Poughkeepsie branch, descended from Gilbert, the youngest son of Robert Livingston, 1st Lord of Livingston Manor, was not as well off as the more well-known branches, descended from sons Robert and Philip.

Brown, Ashley. "Robert Lowell". Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 169: American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Joseph Conte, State University of New York at Buffalo. Gale Research, 1996. pp. 165-178.

Robert Lowry, born March 12, 1826, graduated in 1854 from the University of Lewisburg (Bucknell University) and became a baptist minister in West Chester, Pennsylvania, New York City, and Brooklyn before rejoining Lewisburg in 1869 as a faculty member and then its chancellor.

Born on January 4, 1835, in Coulston, Surrey, Lyall received his education at Eton and Haileybury College. He joined the Indian civil service at Bulandshahr in the Doab in 1856 and served in many capacities until his retirement in 1887.

Henry Francis Lyte was born on June 1, 1793, at Ednam, Scotland, and educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (the alma mater of Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, in Northern Ireland) and Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Chancellor's Prize for English verse three years in a row, and from which he graduated in 1814.

Thomas Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar in 1826. His political career began in the House of Commons as a Whig member for the borough of Calne, and then for Leeds.

Born in Kenmare, Scotland, Evan MacColl arrived in Canada already a published poet of Gaelic in 1850. His early books of verse were Mountain Minstrel (1836) and Clarsach Nam Beann (1838). He worked in the Liverpool Custom House and then, owing to health problems, emigrated to Kingston, Ontario (where he is buried).

Born on June 9, 1922, in Shanghai, the son of American missionaries (John Gillespie Magee and Faith Emmeline Backhouse), John Gillespie Magee Jr. received his education at the American School, Nanking (1929-31), St. Clare's near Walmer, Kent (1931-35), Rugby School (1935-39), and Avon Old Farms School, near Hartford, Connecticut (1939-40).

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) spent his life as a teacher of English in France. He contributed to various reviews but became known as a poet only some fifteen years before his death. Mallarmé might be called a high priest of poetry. He constantly polished his poems, striving to improve their harmonic effects and to refine the subtlety of the inner world he sought to portray.

Short-story writer and poet, Katherine Mansfield, a pseudonym for Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (from 1910), was born on October 14, 1888, in Wellington, New Zealand. She was educated in the cello at Queen's College, London, 1903-1906, after which she returned to study music in New Zealand 1907-08.

Little is known about Marie de France except that she lived in England where she composed, among other things, some Lais (1167-1184) and a collection of fables adapted from Latin sources. She was of noble birth and the French she uses is the standard literary French of the time.

J. S. Martinez served in the British Honduras Territorial Force in World War I. He dedicated his self-published book of poems, Carribean Jingles, published in Belize about 1926, to Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable James Cran.

Edgar Lee Masters was born August 23, 1868, in Garnett, Kansas, and spent his youth in Shipley Hill, Petersburg, and Lewistown, Illinois. Masters in 1915-16 depicted the latter two communities in his Spoon River Anthology. Educated at Knox College in 1889-90, Masters went on to study the law and was admitted to the bar in 1891.

Nyla Matuk is a Canadian poet. She is the author of Sumptuary Laws (2012) and Oneiric (2009), a chapbook. Her poems have appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals such as Maisonneuve, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Walrus, Event, and The Literary Review of Canada, as well as The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012.

James Clerk Maxwell was born on Nov. 13, 1831, at 14 India St., Edinburgh, to John Clerk Maxwell and Frances Cay. The family home to which he would at last retire was at Glenlair, but after his mother's death young James was sent to Edinburgh for schooling at the Edinburgh Academy, from 1840 to 1847. He excelled at both English and mathematics.

Born in about 1830 in Edinburgh of Irish parents, William McGonagall earned his living as a hand-loom weaver. He married Jean King on July 11, 1846. He heard, and obeyed, a call to write poetry in June 1877 and brought out a collection the next year, including a poem on the great Tay bridge in Dundee.

James McIntyre (1827-1906), an emigrant from Scotland, settled in Ontario in 1841. He founded a furniture factory and store in Ingersoll, Ontario, and used his skills at versifying to advertise his wares and to promote local agriculture, including cheese-making. He published two books of verse:

Herman Melville, born August 1, 1819, in New York City, was educated at the New York Male High School (1825-29), Grammar School of Columbia College (1829-30), and Albany Academy (1830-31). He entered service in merchant shipping in 1839 and travelled the seas until 1844.

Bruce Meyer, a professor of English at Laurentian University at Georgian College, has published 15 volumes of poems, edited many literary anthologies, and authored works of criticism. He is Artistic Director, Leacock Summer Literary Festival and frequently broadcasts on CBC Radio and TV, W Network, and TV Ontario.

David Mills was born in Palmyra, Orford Township, in southwestern Ontario, on March 18, 1831, the child of Nathaniel Mills, one of the first settlers in the area, whose farm was on lot 70, on Talbot Road (now King's highway 3), just north of Lake Erie and west of Clearville.

Born on March 18, 1840, William Cosmo Monkhouse was educated at St. Paul's School from 1848 to 1856. He earned his living at the Board of Trade, in which he worked his way up from clerk to Assistant Secretary of the Finance Department. Privately, Monkhouse was a man of letters: a poet and a critic of art and literature. He published five volumes of verse between 1865 and 1901.

Born November 4, 1771, in Ayrshire, Scotland, James Montgomery was brought up and educated by Moravians near Leeds after his parents left for America, never to return. He became an editorial assistant to the Sheffield Register in 1792.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, born November 30, 1874, in Clinton, on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, Canada, grew up after her mother's death with her relatives in Cavendish. She started writing poetry in 1883 and published first in 1894 after training as a teacher at the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown.

Born at Bungay, Suffolk, on December 6, 1803, Susanna Strickland was the sixth child in a family of eight. Educated at home, three of the Strickland children pursued literary careers. Like Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, and Samuel Strickland went on to write of their experiences in Canada. Susanna's career began in 1822 with the publication of Spartacus, A Roman Story.

William Vaughn Moody was born on July 8, 1869, in Spenser, Indiana, and his family moved in 1871 to New Albany. He obtained his B.A. (1893) and M.A. (1894) at Harvard University, where he became co-editor of the Harvard Monthly, and joined its English Department in the 1894-95 academic year as assistant to Louis E. Gates.

Moore's career was academic: born in New York, he took a B.A. from Columbia University in 1798 and from 1823 to 1850 was Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, whose site he in fact donated for the college.

Marianne Moore was born November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, raised largely by her mother, a schoolteacher at the Metzger Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Marianne Moore entered Bryn Mawr in 1905.

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer taught at the Normal School, Chaflin College, Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1895-96, and in 1897-98 and 1898-99 was an instructor in the second-grade Grammar School there. (I am grateful to Marilyn G. Pringle, Library Director at Chaflin, for undertaking the archival work that for the first time provides information on Moorer's life.)

"Mother Goose" begins as a 1729 English translation of the name of Charles Perrault's tale-teller in Contes de Ma Mere Loye (1697). The popularity of these tales as translated evidently led John Newbery to name his collection of songs Mother Goose's Melody about 1765.

Sachiko Murakami is a Canadian poet and editor. She is the author of The Invisibility Exhibit, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Rebuild. Currently, she is the Poetry Editor at Insomniac Press.

Robert Fuller Murray was born Dec. 26, 1863, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, of John and Emmeline Murray. In 1869 John took his son to Kelso, England, and then to York. He was educated at grammar schools in Ilminster and in Crewkerne. Murray then attended his beloved University of St. Andrews from 1881, succeeding more in English than in classical Greek.

Born at Keswick on October 13, 1844, Ernest James Myers received his education in classics at Cheltenham and Balliol College Oxford. He became a fellow of Wadham College in 1868, where he taught for three years, and then moved to London for twenty years to make his living as a translator and editor.

Shane Neilson was born in New Brunswick. He attended the University of New Brunswick, where he completed his BSc. He obtained his MD from Dalhousie University, his MFA from the University of Guelph, and is currently a PhD candidate at McMaster University. Neilson is the author of five collections of poetry, and a two time winner of the Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Award.

Born in London but educated in convents on the Continent and in England, Edith Nesbit started out as a writer of stories. In 1880, seven months pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a founding member of the Fabian Society when it was founded four years later.

John Henry Newman converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and was ordained in Rome the next year. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Grammar of Assent (1870), and The Idea of a University (1873) are important treatises in nineteenth-century English thought.

Born in London on July 24, 1725, John Newton joined the merchant marine as a youth and had many adventures, including harsh service to a slave-trader. Rescued from this, and while returning home, Newton underwent a sudden religious conversion in March 1748 as he steered the ship through a storm.

Born October 16, 1888, in New York, Eugene O'Neill is the 20th-century's best-known American dramatist. Educated at Princeton, he spent his early years working as a secretary in New York, as a gold-prospector in Honduras, as a seaman on trips to Buenos Aires, South Africa, and Southampton, and as a bit-player in his father's company.

John Boyle O'Reilly, the greatest Irishman in America at the time of his death, was born at Douth Castle, Drogheda, Ireland, on June 28, 1844. After an education at the National School, and an early career in journalism, he enlisted in the Hussars and became a Fenian.

Born on March 14, 1844, in London, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy earned his living in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, which he joined as a junior assistant in the Department of Printed Books in June 1861. He eventually became a valued expert on reptiles. O'Shaughnessy published four volumes of poetry, in 1870, 1872, 1874, and posthumously in 1881.

Thomas William Ogilvie, the poet's grandson, corrects RPO when it asserts that the poet's nationality was Australian: "I can assure you that, while he spent a decade of his young adult life in Australia and wrote much of his verse there, he was definitely a Scot by nationality and a proud Borderer at that!" (August 8, 2007).

Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker was born on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey, the daughter of Henry Rothschild and Eliza Marston. She was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in New York. Her first job, writing captions for Vogue, led to a career in journalism, criticism, light verse, and short-story, play, and screenplay writing.

A prolific American actor and playwright, born in New York City, who wrote more than 50 plays, Payne was renowned for one thing only, the song "Home Sweet Home" from his opera Clari, performed first at Covent Garden on May 8, 1823. He acted as American consul at Tunis 1842-45 and 1851 until his death a year later.

Molly Peacock was born June 30, 1947, in Buffalo, New York, and grew up there. After obtaining her B.A. (magna cum laude) from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969, and her M.A. (with honors) at Johns Hopkins University, she worked in academic administration at Johns Hopkins for seven years before turning full-time to the writing of poetry.

Born on December 30, 1676, at Bampton, Oxfordshire, John Philips was educated at Winchester from 1691 and Christ Church, Oxford, from 1697. Of his poems, The Splendid Shilling (1701), at first published anonymously, and Cyber (1708) were the most highly regarded in his time. The first imitated Milton, and the second Virgil's Georgick.

Carole Gerson (Canadian Poetry From the Beginnings Through the First World War [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994]: 112) notes that Phillips emigrated from Liverpool to Canada in 1865 and worked as a journalist, rising to the position of President, Ottawa Press Gallery, by 1896.

On August 11, 1836, Sarah Morgan Bryan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of Southern gentry. After her mother's death in 1844, she lived with different family members before entering Henry Female College in a four-year general degree program in 1855.

Born near London at Gunnersbury on September 14, 1883, Marjorie Pickthall emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto in 1889. After receiving her education at Bishop Strachan School for Girls, she worked in the library of Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she helped compile a bibliography of Canadian poetry.

Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936, in Detroit, of mother Bert Bunnin Piercy and father Robert Douglas Piercy. She was brought up Jewish by her mother and grandmother. In Early Grrrl, Marge Piercy says, "I started writing poetry regularly and seriously when I was fifteen and my family moved into a house larger by far than we had ever lived in.

Edgar Poe was born on Jan. 19, 1809, to David Poe Jr. and a widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Hopkins (née Arnold), both actors. Edgar and his sister Rosalie were orphaned in Richmond, Virginia, when their parents died of illness in December 1811. Taken in by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan, Edgar was baptised Edgar Allan Poe two years later.

Alexander Pope, born in London at 6:45 p.m. on 21 May 1688 to linen merchant Alexander Pope and his second wife Edith Turner Pope, became the defining poetic force of his age. His poetic accomplishments contrast sharply with the physical disabilities and trying circumstances that plagued him.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, born on October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, obtained an M.A. in Romantic literature after attending the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College from 1901 to 1906. His first job came as lecturer in French and Spanish at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1906, but his resignation was requested.

Thomas Pringle was born January 5, 1789, in Blaiklaw, Roxburghshire, and educated at Kelso and afterwards, in 1805, at Edinburgh University. He became clerk, Commissioner of the Public Records of Scotland, and co-editor, Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and Constable's Magazine, in 1817.

Edmund Bolton attributed The Arte of English Poesie, published anonymously, to George Puttenham in Hypercritica (composed by Bolton in 1621, published in 1722). Puttenham was the nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot, the maker of the first Latin-English dictionary. Little else is known of Puttenham's life or works.

Matt Rader is a Canadian poet, editor, and instructor. He's the author of three critically aclaimed books of poetry: A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno (House of Anansi Press, 2011), Living Things (Nightwood Editions, 2008), and Miraculous Hours (Nightwood Editions, 2005).

Dollie Radford, born in London in 1858 as Caroline Maitland, married fellow poet Ernest Radford in 1883 and published poems as well as fiction for both adults and children until 1910. They had three children, Hester, Margaret, and Maitland. In 1920, she died, a year after Ernest.

Born in 1823, William Brighty Rands published several volumes of children's literature anonymously and contribuetd to periodicals under various pseudonyms, especially Matthew Browne, Henry Holbeach, and T. Talker. He worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and died in 1882. His major publications are

Inventor, civil engineer, and molecular physicist, William John Macquorn Rankine was born July 5, 1820, in Edinburgh. After he was educated at the University of Edinburgh, he became surveyor on waterworks and railways in Dublin and Drogheda in Ireland and later for the Caledonian Railway. During this time he made valuable contributions to the understanding of axle fatigue.

John Reibetanz has published five collections of poetry. The most recent, Mining for Sun, was shortlisted for the ReLit Poetry Award in 2001. He was awarded First Prize in the Petra Kenney Poetry Competition in 2003.

Born October 7, 1849, James Whitcomb Riley gave up formal education in Greenfield Academy, Indiana, early to do art and make a living however he could, as by sign-painting, one-man stand-up comedy, and medicine shows at home and on the road.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a youthful prodigy. He began writing poetry in his early teens and, after running away from home, met Verlaine who took him under his wing. All of Rimbaud's poetry was composed before he reached the age of twenty, when he gave up writing for the life of an adventurer. In his most advanced poetry, Rimbaud abandons logic for suggestion.

Charles G. D. Roberts was born on January 10, 1860, in Douglas, New Brunswick, and grew up near the Tantramar marshes by Sackville. Educated at Fredericton Collegiate School from 1874 to 1876, and at the University of New Brunswick from 1876 to 1879, Roberts quickly published his first book of poetry, Orion, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1880; PS 8485 .O22 O7).

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on Dec. 22, 1869, at Head Tide in Maine and until 1897 lived at the family home in Gardiner, Maine, aside from several years as a student at Harvard University. For the rest of his life he moved in New York and devoted his life to writing poetry. Robinson earned a small living first as a subway inspector and then in the city's customs office.

Alexander Macgregor Rose was born August 17, 1846, in Tomantoul, Banffshire. He graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1867 and became, in 1870, Master of the Free Church School in Gairloch, Rossshire. After returning to Aberdeen to study Divinity from 1871, he was ordained on Sept. 9, 1875, and became minister at the Free Church of Evie and Rendall, Orkney.

Rosemarie Rowley was born in Dublin in 1942. After a spell working in the Agricultural Institute in Dublin, which she left for ecological reasons, she went to England to work for the BBC and as a schoolteacher in Birmingham. She attended Trinity College, Dublin, for her first degree in English, Irish, and Philosophy, graduating with a Distinction in English in the late 'sixties.

Carl Sandburg's parents were Swedish immigrants who settled in Galesburg, Illinois, where he was born. After a time of manual labour, Sandburg spent four years (without obtaining a degree) at its Lombard College and went on to a career in journalism in Chicago as associate editor of System and editorial writer for the Daily News.

Margaret E. Sangster was born Margaret Munson on February 22, 1838, in New Rochelle, New York, and attended schools in Paterson, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York. She gave up an early career in writing when she married George Sangster in 1858. At his death in 1871, she returned to writing, becoming associate editor of Hearth and Home.

Born Augustin Nicholas Ruiz de Santayana y Borais on December 16, 1863, George Santayana was raised for eight years in Avila before moving with his family to America. He lived in Boston and was educated at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1889 with his doctorate and joined its faculty.

Born in Ottawa in 1862, educated at Smith's Falls, Ontario, and Stanstead, Quebec, Scott obtained a position at 17 years old as a clerk in the Indian Branch of the federal government and before his retirement in 1932 had risen to become deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs. From 1893 to 1947 he published nine volumes of poetry:

Frederick George Scott, known as "the poet of the Laurentians," was born in Montreal in 1861 and educated at Bishop's College, Lennoxville (B.A., 1881; M.A., 1884). Made an Anglican priest in 1886, he become rector of St. Matthew's Church in Quebec City.

Edmund Hamilton Sears was born on April 6, 1810, and educated at Union College in Schenectady, New York, 1831-34, and Harvard Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1837. He became a missionary for the American Unitarian Association, a minister for congregations in Wayland and Lancaster, Massachusetts, and editor, from 1859 to 1871, of The Monthly Religious Magazine.

Born in New York and Harvard-educated in Italian studies, Seeger edited the Harvard Monthly in 1906. He had travelled to Paris and settled in his Latin Quarter in 1912, where he enlisted in the Foreign Legion and served in World War I. He was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre and received posthumously the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire.

Elizabeth Siddal(l) was born on July 25, 1829, in Holborn, London, the child of Charles Crooke Siddall and Elizabeth Elenor Evans Siddall. She had a very ordinary upbringing, distinguished only by her personal beauty, but it was enough. She caught the eye of a pre-Raphaelite painter, Walter Howell Deverell, as she worked in a bonnet store in Cranbourne Alley, London.

After training in Egypt, Tom Skeyhill fought as a regimental signaller of the second (Victorian) Infantry Brigade of the Australian armed forces at Gallipoli from April 25, 1915, to May 8, when a shell explosion blinded him during an advance at Cape Helles. He was hospitalized at Al-Hayat, Helouin, Egypt, and then at the Base Hospital in Melbourne.

Born March 17, 1832, in Percy, Northumberland, Joseph Skipsey was a colliery worker at seven years of age. He made himself educated, publishing verse in local newspapers until he was gradually able to leave harsh labour behind him. He earned a living as caretaker to schools and colleges. He and his wife Sara Ann Hendley, married in 1854, had eight children.

Arabella Eugenia Smith was born in 1844 in Lichfield, Ohio, and resided from 1850 to 1874 in Percival, Iowa. She graduated from Tabor College (originally Tabor Literary Institute, 1853-66, open to both sexes) in Tabor, Iowa. This Christian College offered four-year courses in classics, science, and literature and was located on a plateau between the Nishnabotna and Missouri Rivers.

Florence Margaret (Stevie) Smith was born on 20 September 1902 at 34 Delapole Avenue, Hull, Yorkshire. She was the daughter of Ethel Rahel and Charles Ward Smith. Her father left home for the merchant navy when his shipping business collapsed in 1906, leaving young Smith, her elder sister and mother to live off the inheritance provided by her maternal grandfather.

Born June 3, 1771, Sydney Smith was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he took a B.A. in 1792 and an M.A. in 1796. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1796 and became a curate in Nether Avon, near Amesbury. Moving to Edinburgh as a tutor, Smith published his first book of sermons and married Catharine Amelia Pybus.

Sorley's father describes his son's life as follows: "He was born at Old Aberdeen on 19th May 1895. His father was then a professor in the University of Aberdeen, and he was of Scottish descent on both sides. From 1900 onwards his home was in Cambridge.

Born and educated in Toronto, Raymond Souster is that city's most loved poet and servant to poetry. He worked at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from 1939 to his retirement in 1985, a career interrupted only from 1941 to 1945, when he served as ground crew in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

A standard edition is The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, et al. (9 vols.; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1932-49). A good single-volume edition, without notes, is The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912).

Carmine Starnino is a Canadian poet, editor, and literary critic. He's the author of four collections of poetry including This Way Out (Gaspereau Press, 2009), which was nominated for the Govenor General's Award.

Wallace Stevens was born October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennysylvania, and was educated in classics at Reading Boys' High School and at Harvard as a special student 1897-1900. There he acted as President of the Harvard Advocate and published some verse. After several years as a reporter in New York, Stevens entered New York Law School in 1901 and eventually clerked for W. G.

Joseph Trumbull Stickney was born in Geneva on June 20, 1874, and grew up (to a height of six feet four inches) as his parents travelled widely ... Wiesbaden, Florence, Nice, London, and New York. After being educated by his father Austin at home in Latin and Greek, Trumbull entered Harvard University in 1891. He graduated magna cum laude in June 1895.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811. A student at the Hartford Female Academy, founded by her sister Catherine, Stowe went on to teach there and at the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, also founded by her sister after their father, Lyman Beecher, became President of Lane Theological Seminary there.